Tuesday, July 1, 2014

With so many scandals and failures within the Obama White House,
it’s hard to keep up with all of them because there are so many. The good news
for you is that I’ve compiled an A-Z listing of Obama’s scandals and failures.
The bad news, Obama is still the President.

A.Associated Press Scandal – Remember this? When Attorney
General Eric Holder issued his own subpoena to seize phone records of a
journalist? Apparently there was a “leak” and the Obama Administration doesn’t
want you thinking for yourself, so he teamed up with his legal lapdog and
seized several journalists personal home phone records, as well as many other
office documents. I just wish that we had some sort of law that prohibited such
things…like freedom of the press, or unlawful search & seizure…something
really catchy so we don’t get into this mess again.

B.Benghazi – If you don’t know about this, there is simply
no hope for you. Here’s what Jason Mattera had to say when he spoke with the
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about her failure to
protect our foreign officials.

C.Chinook Helicopter – This story didn’t get picked up
immediately because we were to busy celebrating the death of Osama Bin Laden,
but shortly after the successful raid, 38 people died when an RPG shot down a
Chinook helicopter on Aug 6, 2011. Official reports have been released but with
many details left out, and still virtually no answers from the White House
about why this team was sent out in a hostile environment unprepared to handle
any level of violence.

D.Drones –
The infamous unmanned aircraft that can wage wars while you’re sipping a big
gulp happens to be Barack Obama’s favorite method of killing. Of course,
naturally, drones started towards the end of Bush 2’s presidency, but
absolutely skyrocketed once Obama took office. It’s even been said that under
G.W. there was a drone attack every 43 days, but under the Obama
administration, there was a drone attack every four days. The ironic thing is
that Obama currently holds a Nobel Peace Prize. The sad thing is that he is
become really good at killing.

E.Eric Holder –
America’s dickhead neighborhood watchman, and 82nd Attorney General of the
United States is the only sitting cabinet member to be held in contempt of
Congress. In fact, there probably isn’t a scandal on this list that he wasn’t a
part of in some fashion.

F.Fort Hood –
What do you get when you take a practicing Muslim who makes anti-american
statements, and associates with suspected terrorists, and combine it with a
President who couldn’t care less? You get the 2009 Fort Hood shooting where 13
people lost their lives to Nidal Malik Hasan, an army major who declared his
wanting to defend the lives of his Taliban leaders. The President was
criticized for his refusal to acknowledge that the shooting was an act of
terrorism and deemed it as “Workplace Violence”.

G.Guantanamo – No doubt, this is the joker in Obama’s deck.
Whenever he needs public support behind him, no matter what scandal is public,
he will bust out closing Guantanamo forever. Say anything you can to win, right?

H.Healthcare.gov – For the .000001% who were not around for
the disastrous rollout of President Obama’s signature “accomplishment”, here’s
the gist of it…Obama force-fed a crappy law on the American People, that they
didn’t even read, and the website didn’t work. If this still isn’t
registering with you, here’s a list of American accomplishments that took less time to
build than healthcare.gov

I.IRS Scandal – Now according to the President, there is not one smidgen of corruption within the IRS. But according to
everyone else in the country, B.O. was using the IRS to bully conservative
groups that were filing for tax-exempt status. As pathetic as that sounds, it’s
true, and the finger is pointed directly at the President. God Bless America

J.Jay Carney – He’s the guy your mother forced you to have
play dates with in grade school. Think back, I’m sure there was someone like
that in your elementary school. If not…then this just got real awkward, real quick.
Anyway, Jay Carney grew up to be a White House Press Secretary, an
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, working for the President of The United States.
You’re forever ingrained in the history books, one can only dream of such an
opportunity…but then again, would you want his gig? Anyway, the reason Jay is
on this list is weird, because if you worked for the highest office, especially
one under this administration knowing that your every mistake is going to be
scrutinized, wouldn’t you hide your soviet-era propaganda away from
photographers? I mean, at least TRY to seem like you’re not an anti-capitalist?
But take a look at a recent photoshootwith the Carney family for MOM magazine. It’s almost
like staring into the future.

K.Keystone Pipeline – The 1,700 mile, $7 billion project
that would deliver over 700,000 barrels of oil per day has been a source of
contention between democrats and republicans for a few years now. The split seems
obvious but when you dig a little deeper you can see some heavy-hitting political donors that are paying politicians for their opposition to it. Despite
that even former President Bill Clinton supports the pipeline.

L.Lobbyist –
In 2007, Candidate Barack Obama vowed that the days of “lobbyist running the
agenda were over” and claimed that they would not work in his White House. He
must have forgotten about his promise, because he’s hired over 100 lobbyists that fund his campaign, set the
agenda and work in his White House. It seems to me that the problem isn’t the
lobbyist, but rather the politician who can’t keep his hands in his own
pockets.

M. Monsanto –
Is the world’s leading producer of genetically modified foods, which means that
they’re the company who openly put toxins, allergens, and diseases in our food, which is super
gross, and why I prefer to eat organic foods (don’t hate). In 2007 Obama
campaigned against this, seemed reasonable at the time, but there is a big
difference between Obama pre/post-election. Even Mother Jones is pissed, because Obama ended up appointing
the head of Monsanto to run the FDA shortly after his first election. I’m not
joking.

N.NSA – Ahh the National Security Agency. A place of
fearless leadership where brave men and women stand to protect us from anything
that goes bump in the night, regardless of civil liberties and that pesky
little thing we call a Constitution. What started under Bush 2—as the “Patriot
Act” (you remember)—became a campaign slogan for the Junior Senator Barack
Obama running for President, as something that violated our right to privacy
and vowed to end it. Except the last part didn’t happen, instead, the
warrantless government spying increased dramatically over the next couple of
years under his administration, and he would have gotten away with it to, if it wasn't for that pesky consultant Edward Snowden…who now sits in Russia as
Putin’s guest.

O.Operation Fast and Furious – Once upon a time, two men
who were obsessed with gun control, sold weapons to a Mexican cartel in an
effort to arrest and dismantle the cartels (one of whom holds a nobel peace
prize). Shortly after this, the two men lost track of the guns, and a border
patrol agent was murdered with those very guns. I’m sure you can see where this
went.

P.Putin – The Campaigning politician was caught on open mic
speaking with outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev claiming that he’s on
his “last election” and will have more flexibility to negotiate MISSILE CONTROL once the
campaign has ended. Medvedev promised to relay the message to Mr. Putin.
Conveniently enough, this got turned into a partisan argumentthat quickly died.

Q.Questions – There are still some lingering questions
after Obama recently made a promise to students who are getting hit with some
heavy student loans. The idea of student loan forgiveness sounds great to those
who have a significant debt on their backs, but economically speaking, does not
make any bit of sense. The convenient timing of all this is that the President
had the Veterans Affairs Scandal, a resigning White House Press Secretary, the
IRS scandal, and Benghazi was coming back into the spotlight with Trey Gowdy
leading the charge this time. Seriously, I wish I had his job, say whatever you
want, do whatever you want, and when you fail…blame the other guy (GOP).

R.Recess Appointments – This wasn’t a ‘major’ scandal by
any means, but just continues to prove that President Obama is a complete and
total control freak. He issued a recess appointment for the Senate when they
weren’t in recess. I know it sounds super nit-picky but the Supreme Court had
to step in and give him a slap on the wrist. Just to show how legit this was,
here’s an article from MSNBC…for real.

S.Solyndra – Obama’s wet dream that ultimately was a dud.
The clean technology company wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars,
laid off 1,100 employees, and was raided by the FBI under suspicion of
accounting fraud. Serenity Now.

T.Timothy Geithner – The 75th Secretary of the
Treasury aka the guy who prints our money aka the guy who cheated on his taxes,
but no one cared because democrats are such forgiving people. How nice…

U.Unemployment numbers –
I think that it’s safe to say that Barack Obama is a “say anything to win”
politician. This became incredibly prevalent during the 2012 elections. The
POTUS had to compete against Mitt Romney, who literally made a fortune out of
turning failing businesses into profitable one, and was noticeably out of his
comfort zone, because the economy was still in the toilet. So if you have no
record to run on, what do you do? You make up a record and tout your successes
around the country; at least that’s exactly what he did. According to a New
York Post article, in August of 2012, the unemployment numbers dropped
from 8.1% to 7.8%. Red flags went up immediately; only it was too late, he
would move on to win the reelection, and the power hungry president would
continue. Forbes magazine did an even more in-depth look into the fudged
unemployment numbers. Click Here

V.VA Scandal – Words cannot describe how shameful this is.
Veterans are literally dying while waiting to be treated for their war-related
injuries while the President is playing golf. If you’re as upset as I am, and
want to help, please take a minute and check out some of these organizations: Wounded Warrior Project, Concerned Veterans for
America. Veterans are the backbone of this country.

W.Weapons of Mass Destruction – In 2002 (yes 2002),
according to a BBC article the
US aka Bush 2 claimed that Syria had a “long-standing chemical weapons
program”. This seemed crazy to me because for the next 12 years, all I’ve heard
from liberals is that Bush is a warmonger and there were never any WMD’s, until
2011 when Syria broke out into a civil war, and their President Bashar
Al-Assad, slaughtered his own people with chemical weapons. We almost went over
there, but B.O. has no balls, so instead we just gave them a ton of taxpayer
money, weapons and training only to find out they’re in fact a terrorist
organization; and apparently still using chemical weapons over there

X. This
one was hard, but don’t worry, we still got some time.

Y. You didn’t build that – Remember when the POTUS said this
on the campaign trail? Yeah…about that…I would keep this quiet around Jason
Mattera…I’m pretty sure he might disagree.

Z.Zero Votes – That’s the number of Senate Democrats that
voted for Obama’s first two budgets. How embarrassing? Better yet, not one budget has been approved yet in 6 years! But I’m sure it’s more
complicated than the fact that the President suffers from economic impotence,
it just has to be, you Bush loving racist.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Slavery Reparations

By Walter E. Williams

Calls for slavery reparations have returned with the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations" in The Atlantic magazine (May 21, 2014). In making his argument, Coates goes through the horrors of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and gross racial discrimination.First off, let me say that I agree with reparations advocates that slavery was a horrible, despicable violation of basic human rights. The gross discrimination that followed emancipation made a mockery of the guarantees of the U.S. Constitution. I also agree that slave owners and slave traders should make reparations to those whom they enslaved. The problem, of course, is that slaves, slave owners and slave traders are all dead. Thus, punishing perpetrators and compensating victims is out of the hands of the living.Punishing perpetrators and compensating victims is not what reparations advocates want. They want government to compensate today's blacks for the bondage suffered by our ancestors. But there's a problem. Government has no resources of its very own. The only way for government to give one American a dollar is to first — through intimidation, threats and coercion — confiscate that dollar from some other American.Therefore, if anybody cares, a moral question arises. What moral principle justifies punishing a white of today to compensate a black of today for what a white of yesterday did to a black of yesterday?There's another moral or fairness issue. A large percentage, if not most, of today's Americans — be they of European, Asian, African or Latin ancestry — don't even go back three or four generations as American citizens. Their ancestors arrived on our shores long after slavery. What standard of justice justifies their being taxed to compensate blacks for slavery? For example, in 1956, thousands of Hungarians fled the brutality of the USSR to settle in the U.S. What do Hungarians owe blacks for slavery?There's another thorny issue. During slavery, some free blacks purchased other blacks as a means to free family members. But other blacks owned slaves for the same reason whites owned slaves — to work farms or plantations. Are descendants of these slaveholding blacks eligible for and deserving of reparations?When African slavery began, there was no way Europeans could have enslaved millions of Africans. They had no immunity from diseases that flourished in tropical Africa. Capturing Africans to sell into slavery was done by Arabs and black Africans. Would reparations advocates demand that citizens of Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Kenya and several Muslim states tax themselves to make reparation payments to progeny of people whom their ancestors helped to enslave?Reparations advocates make the foolish unchallenged argument that the United States became rich on the backs of free black labor. That's nonsense that cannot be supported by fact. Slavery doesn't have a very good record of producing wealth. Slavery was all over the South, and it was outlawed in most of the North. Buying into the reparations argument about the riches of slavery, one would conclude that the antebellum South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth of the matter is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our nation were places where slavery flourished — Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia — while the richest states and regions were those where slavery was absent: Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts.One of the most ignored facts about slavery's tragic history — and it's virtually a secret today — is that slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years. It did not become a moral issue until the 18th century. Plus, the moral crusade against slavery started in the West, most notably England.I think the call for slavery reparations is simply another hustle. Advocates are not demanding that government send checks to individual black people. They want taxpayer money to be put into some kind of reparations fund from which black leaders decide who receives how much and for what purpose.

Saturday, October 5, 2013

Tax legislation has to originate in the House; the health-care law didn’t.

Of all the fraud perpetrated in the passage of Obamacare — and the fraud has been epic — the lowest is President Obama’s latest talking point that the Supreme Court has endorsed socialized medicine as constitutional. To the contrary, the justices held the “Affordable” Care Actunconstitutional as Obama presented it to the American people: namely, as a legitimate exercise of Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce.
To sustain this monstrosity, Chief Justice John Roberts had to shed his robes and put on his legislator cap. He rewrote Obamacare as a tax — the thing the president most indignantly promised Americans that Obamacare was not. And it is here that our recent debate over the Constitution’s Origination Clause — the debate in whichMatt Franck, Ramesh Ponnuru, Mark Steyn, and yours truly have probed the historical boundaries of the “power of the purse” reposed by the Framers in the House of Representatives — descends from the airy realm of abstraction and homes in on a concrete violation of law.
It is not just that the intensely unpopular Obamacare was unconstitutional as fraudulently portrayed by the president and congressional Democrats who strong-armed and pot-sweetened its way to passage. It is that Obamacare is unconstitutional as rewritten by Roberts. It is a violation of the Origination Clause — not only as I have expansively construed it, but even under Matt’s narrow interpretation of the Clause.
It is worth pausing here briefly to rehearse an argument often made in these pages before the Supreme Court ruling two summers ago. The justices’ resolution, whatever it was to be, would in no way be an endorsement of Obamacare; it would merely reflect the fact that our Constitution, designed for a free people, permits all manner of foolishness. “Constitutional” does not necessarily mean “good.” What Obamacare always needed was a political reversal in Congress. Thus, it was unwise for Republicans to become passive while hoping the justices would do their heavy lifting for them — both because it was unlikely that this Supreme Court would invalidate Obamacare and because a ruling upholding it would inevitably be used by the most demagogic administration in history as a judicial stamp of approval for socialized medicine.

Contrary to Obama’s latest dissembling, the Supreme Court’s decision is far from an imprimatur. The president insisted that Obamacare was not a tax, famously upbraiding George Stephanopoulos of the Democratic-Media Complex for insolently suggesting otherwise. Yet, the narrow Court majority held that the mammoth statute could be upheld only as an exercise of Congress’s power to tax — i.e., contrary to Obama’s conscriptive theory, it was not within Congress’s commerce power to coerce Americans, as a condition of living in this country, to purchase a commodity, including health insurance.
Note the crucial qualifier: Obamacare could be upheld only as a tax. Not that Obamacare is necessarily a legitimate tax. To be a legitimate tax measure, Obamacare would have to have complied with all the Constitution’s conditions for the imposition of taxes. Because Democrats stubbornly maintained that their unilateral handiwork was not a tax, its legitimacy vel non as a tax has not been explored. Indeed, it is because Obamacare’s enactment was induced by fraud — a massive confiscation masquerading as ordinary regulatory legislation so Democrats could pretend not to be raising taxes — that the chief justice was wrong to rebrand it post facto and thus become a participant in the fraud.
We now know Obamacare was tax legislation. Consequently, it was undeniably a “bill for raising revenue,” for which the Constitution mandates compliance with the Origination Clause (Art. I, Sec. 7). The Clause requires that tax bills must originate in the House of Representatives. Obamacare did not.
If you’ve followed our recent debate, you know I’ve argued that the continuing resolution (CR) — the legislation at issue in the current congressional impasse that has partially shut down the government – violates the Origination Clause. The Senate presumed to add Obamacare spending to a House CR bill. I contend that the Origination Clause means that not only tax bills but government spending bills must originate in the House because the Clause was intended to vest the House with control over the “power of the purse.” Matt disagrees.
Our dispute over Obamacare spending in the 2013 CR, however, has no bearing on the Origination Clause analysis of the 2010 Obamacare law itself. The Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court has held, was a straightforward tax. No theorizing about spending is necessary. Everyone agrees that tax-raising measures must originate in the House.
Obamacare originated in the Senate.
It was introduced in Congress in 2009 by Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who called it the “Senate health care bill” (a description still touted long afterwards on Reid’s website). Employing the chicanery that marked the legislation through and through, the Democrat-controlled Senate turned its 3,000-page mega-proposal into a Senate amendment. The Senate attached its amendment to a nondescript, uncontroversial House bill (the “Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009”) that had unanimously passed (416–0) in the lower chamber.
Thanks to the Supreme Court, it is now undeniable that Obamacare was tax legislation. It was also, by its own proclamation, a bill for raising revenue. Democrats maintained that the Senate proposal would reduce the federal budget deficit by $130 million. More to the point, the bill contained 17 explicit “Revenue Provisions” — none of which was remotely related to the House bill to which the Senate proposal was attached.
Therefore, Obamacare is revenue-raising tax legislation, originated in the Senate in violation of the Constitution.
This has the Obama administration and its Justice Department scrambling. House conservatives, led by Representative Trent Franks (R., Ariz.), are pushing an Origination Clause challenge in the federal courts.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Years from now, historians may regard the 2008 election of Barack Obama as an inscrutable and disturbing phenomenon, a baffling breed of mass hysteria akin perhaps to the witch craze of the Middle Ages. How, they will wonder, did a man so devoid of professional accomplishment beguile so many into thinking he could manage the world's largest economy, direct the world's most powerful military, execute the world's most consequential job?

Imagine a future historian examining Obama's pre-presidential life: ushered into and through the Ivy League despite unremarkable grades and test scores along the way; a cushy non-job as a "community organizer"; a brief career as a state legislator devoid of legislative achievement (and in fact nearly devoid of his attention, so often did he vote "present"); and finally an unaccomplished single term in United States Senate, the entirety of which was devoted to his presidential ambitions. He left no academic legacy in academia, authored no signature legislation as legislator.

And then there is the matter of his troubling associations: the white-hating, America-loathing preacher who for decades served as Obama's "spiritual mentor"; a real-life, actual terrorist who served as Obama's colleague and political sponsor. It is easy to imagine a future historian looking at it all and asking: how on Earth was such a man elected president?

Not content to wait for history, the incomparable Norman Podhoretz addressed the question recently in the Wall Street Journal:

To be sure, no white candidate who had close associations with an outspoken hater of America like Jeremiah Wright and an unrepentant terrorist like Bill Ayers would have lasted a single day. But because Mr. Obama was black, and therefore entitled in the eyes of liberaldom to have hung out with protesters against various American injustices, even if they were a bit extreme, he was given a pass.

Let that sink in: Obama was given a pass -- held to a lower standard -- because of the color of his skin.Podhoretz continues:

And in any case, what did such ancient history matter when he was also articulate and elegant and (as he himself had said) "non-threatening," all of which gave him a fighting chance to become the first black president and thereby to lay the curse of racism to rest?

Podhoretz puts his finger, I think, on the animating pulse of the Obama phenomenon -- affirmative action. Not in the legal sense, of course. But certainly in the motivating sentiment behind all affirmative action laws and regulations, which are designed primarily to make white people, and especially white liberals, feel good about themselves.

Unfortunately, minorities often suffer so that whites can pat themselves on the back. Liberals routinely admit minorities to schools for which they are not qualified, yet take no responsibility for the inevitable poor performance and high drop-out rates which follow. Liberals don't care if these minority students fail; liberals aren't around to witness the emotional devastation and deflated self esteem resulting from the racist policy that is affirmative action. Yes, racist. Holding someone to a separate standard merely because of the color of his skin -- that's affirmative action in a nutshell, and if that isn't racism, then nothing is. And that is what America did to Obama.

True, Obama himself was never troubled by his lack of achievements, but why would he be? As many have noted, Obama was told he was good enough for Columbia despite undistinguished grades at Occidental; he was told he was good enough for the US Senate despite a mediocre record in Illinois; he was told he was good enough to be president despite no record at all in the Senate. All his life, every step of the way, Obama was told he was good enough for the next step, in spite of ample evidence to the contrary. What could this breed if not the sort of empty narcissism on display every time Obama speaks?

In 2008, many who agreed that he lacked executive qualifications nonetheless raved about Obama's oratory skills, intellect, and cool character. Those people -- conservatives included -- ought now to be deeply embarrassed. The man thinks and speaks in the hoariest of clichés, and that's when he has his teleprompter in front of him; when the prompter is absent he can barely think or speak at all. Not one original idea has ever issued from his mouth -- it's all warmed-over Marxism of the kind that has failed over and over again for 100 years.

And what about his character? Obama is constantly blaming anything and everything else for his troubles. Bush did it; it was bad luck; I inherited this mess. It is embarrassing to see a president so willing to advertise his own powerlessness, so comfortable with his own incompetence. But really, what were we to expect? The man has never been responsible for anything, so how do we expect him to act responsibly?

In short: our president is a small and small-minded man, with neither the temperament nor the intellect to handle his job. When you understand that, and only when you understand that, will the current erosion of liberty and prosperity make sense. It could not have gone otherwise with such a man in the Oval Office.

But hey, at least we got to feel good about ourselves for a little while. And really, isn't that all that matters these days?

Author's Note. A lot of readers have written in asking me how I came to the conclusion that Obama was an unremarkable student and that he benefited from affirmative action. Three reasons:

1) As reported by The New York Sun: "A spokesman for the university, Brian Connolly, confirmed that Mr. Obama spent two years at Columbia College and graduated in 1983 with a major in political science. He did not receive honors..." In spite of not receiving honors as an undergrad, Obama was nevertheless admitted to Harvard Law. Why?

2) Obama himself has written he was a poor student as a young man. As the Baltimore Sun reported, in:

"'Obama's book 'Dreams from My Father,'....the president recalled a time in his life...when he started to drift away from the path of success. 'I had learned not to care,' Obama wrote. '... Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it.' But his mother confronted him about his behavior. 'Don't you think you're being a little casual about your future?" she asked him, according to the book. '... One of your friends was just arrested for drug possession. Your grades are slipping. You haven't even started on your college applications.'"

3) Most damning to me is the president's unwillingness to make his transcripts public. If Obama had really been a stellar student with impeccable grades as an undergrad, is there any doubt they would have been made public by now and trumpeted on the front page of the New York Times as proof of his brilliance? To me it all adds up to affirmative action.